Biography

Etienne de Klerk completed his BSc and MSc degrees at the University of Pretoria in South Africa,  and obtained his PhD degree from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands in 1997. From January 1998 to September 2003, he held assistant professorships at the Delft University of Technology, and from September 2003 to September 2005 an associate professorship at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization. In September 2004 he was appointed at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, first as an associate professor, and then as full professor (from June 2009). From August 29th, 2012, until August 31st, 2013, he was also appointed as full professor in the Division of Mathematics of the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. From September 1st, 2015 to August 31st 2019, he also held a full professorship at the Delft University of Technology (1 day/week position). 

Dr. De Klerk's main research interest is mathematical optimization, and his publications include the monograph Aspects of Semidefinite Programming (Kluwer/Springer, 2002). He has served five 3-year terms as associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Optimization,  two 3-year terms as associate editor of the INFORMS Journal Operations Research, and has been guest editor of two issues of Mathematical Programming B. 

He is a co-recipient of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation's New Opportunities Fund award, a recipient of the VIDI grant of the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and a co-recipient of the ENW-GROOT grant of the NWO. He received the 2017 Best Paper Prize from  the Springer journal Optimization Letters for joint work on the complexity of gradient descent methods.